Music

Friday, January 15, 2016

The best thing about not
getting paid to write about movies is that I don’t have to discuss the Oscars.
I lost all interest in the Oscars a long time ago; if I had to pinpoint the
exact moment, I would probably go with the day the nominations were announced
in 1987, the year that Blue Velvet,
the major breakthrough movie event of my twenties, failed to score a Best
Picture nomination. Dennis Hopper, who had been out of action for years due to
a combination of drugs, drink, and bad karma, gave the performance of his
career in that movie, and the Academy, unable to resist a comeback story, gave
him a Best Supporting Actor nomination—for Hoosiers.
A crew from Entertainment Tonight had
a camera pointed at his face the moment he heard the announcement. Steven Rea
didn’t look that surprised in the bedroom scene in The Crying Game.

I do remember when the
nominations were announced in 2013, because I was paid to write a paragraph
about them that year. The premise must have been something like “Which Academy
Awards Nomination Is the Happiest Surprise?” because I remember writing that I
was happy to see Jennifer Lawrence nominated for Silver Linings Playbook. I wrote that it was nice to see someone
get an Oscar nomination for being so funny and sexy and emotionally alive in an
entertaining light comedy, though of course there was no way in hell she would
win. I quickly got an email from my editor advising me that if they ran this,
I’d look pretty stupid, because “everybody” knew that she was a lead pipe cinch
to take the little gold nudist. She did win, though I swear it wasn’t until the
morning after the ceremony that I learned, from reading the stories about who
won and why, that both the movie and her performance in it were desperate pleas
that we as a society do more to address the plight of the mentally ill. The
upshot is that not only do the Academy and I have drastically different
priorities and opinions regarding what is important and deserving of acclaim in
movies, when we do appear to agree on something, it’s usually for different
reasons.

I just saw a TV
commercial in which the voice of God (i.e. Morgan Freeman) proclaims that there
is “one night when we all dream in gold.” This did make me throw up in my mouth
a little. It’s the “we” that bugs me; I don’t mind the Oscars existing and
don’t want them to change to suit my tastes and interests. That would be like
trying to change who gets elected Prom King. But I do mind the shared
assumption that the Academy’s values are those of America, are at least those
who really care about movies in the right way, and I’d rather not even bitch
about them, because treating them as something worth complaining about just
confirms their power. It’s not as if there won’t be plenty of people eager to
show that they not only disagree with the Academy’s values and priorities but
are prepared to spend the next month screaming about them online. I’ve already
seen enough tweets and Facebook posts today to know that the Academy still
really doesn’t give a shit if people on social media don’t think it honors
diversity. I’ve also heard that Ryan Coogler, Michael B. Jordan, and Tessa
Thompson didn’t get nominated for Creed
but that Sylvester Stallone did, and I’m assuming that’s a typo that’s on its
way to becoming an urban legend. The Oscars are full of shit, but nobody’s that
full of shit.

The Oscar nominees who
are easiest to slip and care about, however briefly, are the actors, because in
narrative movies, actors are still the human material onscreen (and, in most
animated movies, on the soundtrack) who do so much of the heavy lifting in
involving the audience emotionally. A great director can use every element of
moviemaking to draw us in and communicate with and even move the viewer, but a
director who concentrates on perfecting a visual style or establishing total
control at the expense of using the actors as full collaborators—I would name
cite Kubrick and recent Malick as cautionary examples—does so at his peril. And
in movies by lesser talents, the actors are the elements most likely to keep a
viewer engaged, which is no small thing, given that those of us who watch a lot
of movies are fated to spend most of our time in the theater watching movies
that were not made by great directors. Like Marya, I find acting an especially
mysterious art and tend to cut the people who perform it with honesty and
imagination a certain amount of slack.

Part of the fascination
of the documentary Listen to Me, Marlonis hearing Brando, in his own words spoken in his own voice, spend an adult
lifetime failing to adequately explain to himself just how it is he does what
he did better than any American of his generation, which seems to have made it
harder for him to take any pride in it. You also get to hear Bernardo
Bertolucci describe Brando as “shocked” when he saw himself in Last Tango in Paris. In that movie,
Brando is not “being himself.” He is playing a character named Paul who is
different than him in many ways. But Bertolucci clearly guided him to use as
much of himself as he dared in the process of constructing the character, which
in turn caused him to connect with Paul’s emotions with special, exciting
force. The fact that Brando didn’t realize how nakedly exposed he would look in
that movie—which in turn would leave many ticket-buying chowderheads to take it
on faith that this charged portrait of a sometimes repellent character was a
bare self-portrait—until he saw the finished product, and realized what
Bertolucci had done, says a lot about the power differential between actors and
directors. It also says a lot about Brando’s disengagement from his profession
for much of the rest of his life. There will always be people who see the
Brando of the post-1972 period as a lazy, slumming whore. But few enough people
could have given anything like the performance he did in Last Tango; how many of us are qualified to imagine what it must
have felt like to even consider what it might have taken to keep working at
that level, especially if it meant going that deep inside himself again?

I didn’t see any Brando-level
performances this year, but I do think that Jennifer Lawrence, more
supernaturally alive than just about anybody onscreen, has shown an amazing
gift for playing clear-eyed, passionate heroes who won’t back down, whether
they’re bent on toppling a dictatorship or selling a mop, and this year she’ll
turn the same age Brando was when he made his first movie. There were, as they
say on the infomercials, some amazing discoveries: Daisy Ridley in you-know-what,Britt Robertsonin Brad Bird’s overly maligned epic bomb Tomorrowland, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor in Tangerine, Shameik Moore and the other
young performers in Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope.
Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina and The Man from UNCLE, Rebecca Ferguson in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Nadia
Hilker in Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s genre-bending horror romance Spring, which also boasts a wonderful
performance by Lou Taylor Pucci as an American in Italy whose emotional state
shades gratefully from PYSD to lovestruck. (It’s sort of like Before Sunrise with tentacles.) In Brooklyn, Saorise Ronan grows up
onscreen, transforming herself from a painfully shy fish out of water into a
confident woman of the world; she made me feel as if I were finally seeing the
performance I read about whenever Jessica Chastain plays a young earth mother.
Dakota Johnson gives an irresistible star performance in Fifty Shades of Grey, without a shred of help from her material,
director, or co-star. (The fact that she’s right there with them on the list of
Razzies nominees is a terrible indictment of what indulging in kneejerk,
unreflective mockery of officially certified bad movies does to the brain.)

In Carol, Kyle Chandler plays a character who could easily have been
the mustache-twirling villain of the piece—the straight ex-husband who’d like
to “cure” his wife of her desire for other women and isn’t above using their
daughter as a weapon against her—and illuminates the man’s mixture of
humiliation, anger, and romantic despair in a way that makes it hard not to
feel for him. Emotionally, he’s the least opaque thing about the movie. John
Cena is hilarious as Amy Schumer’s fuck buddy who thinks they might be
something more in Trainwreck, and he
manages to make the character’s dimness and sexual confusion funny without any
winks to the audience to distance himself from this jerk. (He’s so good he
partly derails the movie; I didn’t want the heroine to marry him, but I was
disappointed that, after he got fed up and walked out with plenty of movie left
to go, he stayed gone.) Rose Byrne is almost as good in Spy, playing straight woman to Melissa McCarthy without ever
turning to stone.

Oscar Isaac surprised me
in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I’ve
seen a lot of terrific performances from him, but most of them—like his work
earlier this year in Ex Machina—have
been variations on the basic template of a dislikable but strangely charismatic
asshole. I would not have guessed that he could do the smart-mouth hero who
does his best to sass the bad guys to death as if he were to the flight suit
born. Jeremy Strong’s Sahara-level dryness as one of Steve Carell’s minions
really shines in the context of all the hand-waving and meticulously enacted
neurotic tics of The Big Short. I
always cheer up whenever Ben Mendelsohn shows up, in movies like Slow West and Mississippi Grind or the Netflix series Bloodline, and starts magnetically spraying seediness around as if
he were trying to pollinate the screen. Somewhere, in a world that is much like
our own but that makes better sense, he and Walton Goggins have already played
brothers, twice. (He has an especially lovely duet in a diner with Alfre
Woodard, playing his bookie as if she were his social worker, in Mississippi Grind.)

S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk gave me more of the
epic-Western-with-grindhouse-proclivities that I was expecting from The Hateful Eight—which was, hands, the
big disappointment of the year for me, and a movie that, with its static, prolix
self-indulgence and undistinguished visuals, did more to set back the cause of
“classic” filmmaking technology than a thousand straphangers watching Lawrence of Arabia on their phones—and
Zahler’s movie also makes better use of Kurt Russell. (It gives him a character
to play, rather than just asking him to reheat his John Wayne impression.
Amusingly, as his sidekick in Bone
Tomahawk, Richard Jenkins appears to be doing Walter Brennan.) At a time
when movies in general look as young as ever, Blythe Danner (I’ll See You in My Dreams) and Michael
Caine (Youth) and Ian McKellen (Mr. Holmes) managed to claim big roles
for themselves and shine as brightly in them as ever.

Of course, 2015 was,
first and foremost the fortieth anniversary of Jaws, the movie gave me my first hints that movies were a form with
their own syntax that, when deployed with real smarts and brio, could offer
something more enthralling than a couple of hours killed watching Dean Jones
get his ass saved by a sentient Volkswagen. I spent one afternoon last summer
watching it on a big screen again, courtesy TCM’s reissue program, and I’m here
to tell you, forty years on, that son of a bitch still works like gangbusters.
I would be very happy to spend another thousand words or so expounding on the
reasons for that picture’s greatness, but if any of you don’t already know
about it, I suppose it’s too late to talk sense to you. I would rather look to
the future and imagine all the nine-year-olds who are about to have their minds
blown by some thundercat who has a story to tell (or, like Spielberg at the
time, at least a job to do and an ambition to show the world that no one could
do it better) in such a way that the fever takes full possession of their
hearts and minds. They live in a world that is better positioned than ever to
feed the fever, in as many international flavors as their eager little
appetites can stand. Friends, you and I may disagree on many things, and as
Neil Young is reputed to have said (in a line that he may have stolen from one
of the lesser ‘70s works of Robert Altman), if you and I agreed on everything,
one of us would not be necessary. But I hope we can agree that however daunting
the work ahead may seem, movies are too important to be left to people who
would even threaten to give an acting award to Sylvester Stallone. Seriously,
can I get a fucking amen!?

***********************************************

Phil Dyess-Nugent was a
freelance writer and film critic. His work has appeared in Nerve,
Hi-Lobrow, The A.V. Club, Global Rhythm, The High Hat, The New Orleans
Times-Picayune, and the University of New Orleans Press
anthology Please Forward: How Blogging Reconnected New Orleans After Katrina, as well as numerous personal blogs with deceptively clever titles.
He is currently either retired or unemployable, depending on whether you ask
him about it before he's had his coffee.